THE RED LIGHT

Rex Burress

It was storming outside at 3AM and I glanced awake to see a bright red light on the phone. I crawled out but nothing was there, although I checked out the rest of the house. Red is a sort of danger warning, in addition to being an artist's punch line.

I wonder if the warning aspect of red was derived from the color of fire? I am thinking of the Campfire fire roaring up the hill into Paradise. Pictures taken seemed to feature great blasts of red flame, tinged with yellow, and great clouds of dark smoke although the ash left behind is more gray and white, maybe like fireplace ash. After the fuel-food was eaten, the red and yellow flames disappeared back into the vault of dormancy. It's difficult to look at a woody branch, or a wooden sculpture or a wood chair, and realize that a red flame lurks there, ready to pounce out with a mere spark for ignition, and devour everything.

The color red has chemical connections and is used sparingly in nature, very rarely in winter. In the eastern throes of snowy-gray woods, the male cardinal adds its generous display of red, but few other birds, except for the red-headed woodpecker, announce their presence so vividly. Studies show birds can see color, but many mammals, including canines and cows, are color blind. Their dominant sense is a heightened sense of smell.

We see flashing red lights in a multitude of places, most dramatically on a firetruck, ambulance, or a police car behind you! The city is full of red lights and red stop signs. The international color for 'stop' is red. Kings and commoners alike stop at stoplights! There is a difference in painting-pigment colors and in colored-light primaries if you're doing art work. The light primary chart is red, green, blue, and the pigment chart is red, yellow, and blue. You can mix most other secondary colors from those basic primaries.

In two-dimensional art, red is a powerhouse, and as in nature, best used sparingly for impact. Basic thoughts is to work reds toward the center of a canvas and avoid red at the edge. Like the movie, “50 Shades of Gray,” there are 50 shades of red—and many more. For instance, tomato-red is yellow-based; berry-red is blue-based. “A little bit of red goes a long way.” Red and white will get you pink, and the more white the pinker the shade.

Henry David Thoreau said, “The rose owes it's preeminence in great measure to its color. It is said to be from the Celtic rhos, red. It is nature's most precious color. But brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man's loaf.”

Use of the Native American term 'redskins' is a gross error in naming sport teams, as their beautiful skin is more brown than red, just as 'black' Negro is more brown than black, and I see no yellow in Chinese. Colorblind covers more than color!

In artist Robert Rishell's class, we had a 'black' model for portraits. I was struggling around with deep brown on the face, and the teacher took my brush and demonstrated the inclusion of some other colors, and finishing with a sheen of light blue. “There's more color in there than black,” he said.

Before synthetic colors were made, art-paint was derived from nature, most notably in cave-man wall-paintings, with earth-colors yellow and red ochres, and black from burnt wood. This trend was advanced in Egypt and China 5,000-years-ago. Pulverized minerals and biological pigments, from things like colored stones [original ultramarine blue from lapis lazuli], insect juices [carmine from crushed cochineal beetles]; purple from the mucus of Murex snails, alizarin from the roots of madder. Nearly all replaced with synthetic tubes today that makes color application as easy as squeezing!

“Red is for fire red is for love too it lies in our hand what we wanna choose.”--Shivangi Lavaniya